How Marissa Mayer Can Make Flickr More Awesomer Again

Posted on July 19, 2012, 12:16 pm, by Thomas Hawk, under Flickr.

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The internet has spoken and earlier today Flickr officially responded. Their response pretty much sums up the biggest challenge for Flickr/Yahoo going forward, getting people to work there. Flickr desperately needs four things right now: money/resources, engineering talent, design talent, and community management/marketing talent. Money/resources is the easy part, hiring the talent may prove more difficult.

The trend is not Flickr’s friend. According to compete.com over the past year Flickr’s unique U.S. visitors have dropped about 22%. The sad slow decline of Flickr in many ways mirrors the sad slow decline of lots of other properties at Yahoo.

So why should Marissa Mayer make Flickr awesome again and how should she do it?

The number one reason why Marissa should be focusing on Flickr right now is that it is highest visibility, most beloved Yahoo property of all. You didn’t see mass users taking to the internet to tell her to fix Yahoo Finance, or Yahoo Sports, or Yahoo Real Estate. No. They came cheering for Flickr. Flickr has deeper emotional and social connections to users than any other Yahoo property. Reinvigorating Flickr should be Marissa’s highest priority because it represents the best possible way for her to send the most visible message that Yahoo is in fact changing, that Yahoo is back in the hunt, that Yahoo cares about their users. It’s going to take work and money but it can be done.

Here is how.

1. It has to start at the top. It’s embarrassing that according to a public search Mayer still doesn’t have a Flickr account. Not only does she not have a Flickr account, she’s using one of Flickr’s most public competitors to share her photos personally. This fact was not lost on me and it wasn’t lost on the financial or tech press. From Bloomberg: “…and, like any proud parent these days, the photo-sharing site she linked to wasn’t Flickr—she used Instagram.” From Wired: “But that’s going to take commitment and outreach from Mayer who, right now, doesn’t even have an account there.” Dog fooding is important. If Flickr Mobile is broken, then Mayer needs to suffer through it with the rest of us and hopefully get it fixed.

2. Flickr needs a big hire in an evangelist role. They need to hire a very visible name that will make the press. Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Trey Ratcliff, Chase Jarvis, or someone of this caliber. They need to make a big splash and they need not only a very visible hire, they need someone who is maniacally (in the good way) connected to social media. They need someone who will eat, breath and sleep Flickr and who will be out promoting the brand everywhere on the web and in person. This person should also host at least one major photo walk in one major city a month. Flickr and Yahoo should leverage their resources to make these walks big splashy public events that make people sit up and notice that Flickr has their mojo back. This person will not be cheap. Yahoo will have to pay up and Mayer herself will probably need to help recruit them.

3. Along with a new Flickr evangelist, Mayer should work with them and Flickr head of product Markus Spiering to heavily and personally recruit some of the top engineers and designers to come to work on Flickr. Flickr should not just be hiring regular old engineers and designers. They should be hiring engineers and designers who are the rock stars. Again, they will have to really pay up for these people — right now the rock star talent wants to work at Facebook and Google, not Yahoo.

If they can get 4 or 5 of these rock star types though they can then use these individuals to recruit even more talent to the Flickr team. Flickr needs to be careful here and not just hire any old engineer who wants a 9 to 5 job. They need to recruit engineers who, like Marissa apparently, want to work it 24/7 and are amazing. They should be rewarded very well and Mayer should use her personal connections to get the right people in these seats.

4. Flickr should begin a structured engagement program with their top users. They should use their internal data at Flickr to see which users are engaging the most and are the most engaged with on Flickr. They should personally contact each of these individuals and make them part of the process for improving Flickr. They should set up a private invite only group where they invite the elite of Flickr, those most heavily invested in Flickr engagement, and personally make them a part of the process going forward.

5. Flickr should set up an ambassador program. They should pay ambassadors $1,000/month (these would not be Flickr employees) to represent Flickr in their respective cities. Part of that responsibility would be to host a photowalk at least once a month (if not more). They would also breath new life into the geographic group best represented on Flickr for their area. Flickr might consider inviting them to San Francisco for an offsite once a year.

6. Engineers/Designers should start working on these problems right away: porting Flickr’s new justified pages to the rest of the site, developing circles for your Flickr contact management, giving people better blocking tools on the site, giving people better filtering tools on the site, creating a cross group subscription system that would aggregate all of the threads you are following in all of your groups and managing these threads as a single forum for you personally, building a first class mobile experience on par with Instagram, and a lot of other things. They should position flickr as a fast moving, innovative, perpetual beta team and Yahoo execs and PR should be cheerleaders with every innovation going forward. Want to see how this is done, just watch Vic Gundotra’s Google+ stream.

7. Yahoo should begin re-evaluating their relationship with Getty Images. Their goal should be to get more photographers paid more money and have more of their photos represented in the Getty Collection. If Yahoo cannot improve this situation in a meaningful way they should consider terminating the Getty relationship, acquiring a smaller stock photography competitor and building this in house. Stock photography should not be considered for what it can add to the bottom line, but for what it can do to recruit the best photographers in the world to post their work on Flickr.

8. Yahoo should heavily promote Flickr with it’s other brands. All other Yahoo properties should begin thinking of how they might incorporate Flickr photos into their properties. Image Search seems like a no brainer. It should be a Yahoo goal to double the amount of Flickr photos in their image search results in the next 60 days. Every site that uses photography on Yahoo should be charged with figuring out a way how to increase Flickr Images in their products. Yahoo may need to develop a sort of opt-in structure for this type of promotion (or better yet an opt out) to deal with photographer’s rights issues and grumpy photographers who might not want their work better promoted and represented on Yahoo, but many will enjoy the extra attention and views and it’s a natural place for Yahoo to go to for imagery.

Mayer needs to hold her new team accountable for the performance of unique users at Flickr. Flickr has been losing unique users and if Flickr is going to seriously compete in the new great big photo sharing world of the WWW, they need to let the photographers of the world know that they are back in a big way and are here to win. Success at Flickr should then be highly promoted by Yahoo PR to show that Yahoo does indeed have their mojo back and that Mayer is in fact winning. More than anything this is the reputation that Yahoo needs to change — excelling at Flickr is one of the best ways that Yahoo can illustrate that to the world. If Yahoo can’t do this then they should just call it a day and sell Flickr to Google now. They will just continue to bleed users and it will be a sore reminder that Yahoo is still languishing every time some new meme about making Flickr awesome again catches the internet’s attention.

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Flickr vs. Google+ Unique U.S. Visitors Last One Year

Posted on July 19, 2012, 8:23 am, by Thomas Hawk, under Flickr, Google Plus.

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An Open Letter to Marissa Mayer, CEO Yahoo Inc.

Posted on July 17, 2012, 10:15 am, by Thomas Hawk, under Flickr.

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Dear Marissa,

Congratulations on your new position with Yahoo. I’ve been a huge fan of Google for a long time and have admired the work that you’ve done there. Google Maps, specifically, has been a big part of my life. Google Maps is the primary reason I switched from an iPhone to an Android phone in fact. The ability to add my maps as a layer on a mobile device when I go to photograph a new city is, for me, an incredibly important feature.

You’ve done so much more than look after things like maps at Google though and more than anything you understand the culture that has made Google a success and how the web works more broadly speaking.

I’ve written open letters to the last two Yahoo CEOs, Scott Thompson and Carol Bartz. The third time’s a charm, as they say back in business school, so I thought I’d take an opportunity to welcome you to your new position as well. Hopefully, Yahoo got a winner this time — I think that maybe they did.

First of all, my bias — I’m a photographer. I’m also a photographer who has deeply integrated the web into my photography and into my life. I joined Flickr the year they started in 2004, back before the Yahoo acquisition. I’m what they call “old skool” there. Since then I’ve used the site almost every day of my life. I’ve got over 73,000 photos published there now. Over the last 8 years I’ve favorited over 100,000 photos by other photographers. I’ve spent thousands of hours living in groups, forums, sets, and photostreams. I know the site really well.

Although Flickr has been successful in my opinion, it’s only lived up to about 5% of its potential. Flickr had huge, enormous potential when Yahoo bought the site back in 2005. Flickr *could* have been Facebook. I sincerely believe this. Instead it was clumsily duct taped on to the side of Yahoo. It’s founders worked out their contractual obligations of the sale and then bolted. Stewart Butterfield exited with one of the most creative resignation letters ever written in the history of tech — and after that Flickr was left to wither and almost die.

Flickr never died of course, it’s just that through a combination of Flickr management and Yahoo management it was put into deep sleep mode. The fact that for part of this time Flickr was unprofitable probably didn’t really help their chances. Even when Flickr did start to make money, they didn’t make much. Getting bean counters to invest in some grand future of the web was not something that Yahoo did well back then. The good news was that during this period of time Flickr didn’t really have any serious competition. This was also bad news too though because it created a hostile environment with users where we were abused because, well, where else could you go?

Photos are big part of the future of the web. A huge, giant, massive part of the future of the web. You might say photos were the genesis of Facebook. Why did people come to Facebook originally? To see photos.

Over the past few years web companies are finally beginning to understand the importance of photos. Instagram was a huge hit. They did mobile photos right. What Instagram understood was that people wanted to do two things on their mobile device — see photos by their friends and let their friends know that they were watching by sending a positive vibe. So they made the simpliest interface possible to do just that — you just swipe/scroll, tap/tap, scroll, tap/tap, scroll, tap/tap. This can go on for hours. They also capitalized on this new aesthetic that people have for a vintage film feel with their simple filters and the superiority of the square photo format for presentation.

Google also recognized the potential of photography and, as you know, photos are very deeply integrated into the Google+ experience. What a bunch of winners the team at Google Photos is. Google gave us huge full screen versions of photos first. They gave us great looking photostreams with big oversized thumbnails first. They promoted photographers in big ways. The executives personally reshared our work. They created a special category for photographers on their “Get Started” list. Is it a surprise that so many photographers are so well represented in the 1 million+ follower category on G+? Google understood that integrating beautiful and interesting photos, along with photos by your family and friends, was a way to make G+ more compelling and visually stimulating. Photos completely dominate the new G+ mobile app and tablet app as well.

More than this Google embraced the online photography community in ways that it hadn’t been embraced since the earliest days of Flickr. Google seized the opportunity to showcase that this community could become more than just a web thing. Google sponsored photo walks. Googlers participated in our photo trips. Google gave us broadcasted hangouts. Lotus Carroll and I just broadcasted our 30th weekly episode of Photo Talk Plus last week where photographers can hang out on live video and in a chat room that goes with the show and interact.

The success of Google+ with the photography community was not lost on Facebook. Facebook quickly mimicked Google’s presentation and layout for photos. The old photo thumbnails at Facebook were super tiny. Postage stamped size. Facebook went from just a couple of employees looking after photos to a whole team working on photos. Photos got bigger and better looking. New full screen versions were developed. Photos are featured much more prominently in the timeline feature. Facebook has given notice that they are here to compete with Google+ in photos in a big way. Google has the lead for sure, but Facebook is a serious competitor coming on strong.

So what about Flickr? Flickr represents the largest collection of quality organized photos on the web today. Facebook has more photos, but Flickr has better photos and better organized photos with quality metadata organized around the photos.

Flickr is also probably the most loved and passionately cared about service that Yahoo currently offers. It’s one of those properties whose significance should not be weighed by a profit and loss statement. It should be understood that embracing the passion of these users and harnessing that for Yahoo is the biggest social opportunity for Yahoo at present.

Yahoo has, with Flickr, the core to launch a serious contender to both Google+ and Facebook. Flickr is not “just photos.” Within the DNA of Flickr is a highly social property with serious potential if given the right resources and attention. Flickr Groups could become a powerhouse for groups all across the web that have nothing to do with photography. Competition is fierce though and time is short. Google Events is the first step towards creating a more meaningful group experience at Google and they did Google Events really, really well. It almost feels like it was built for, yes, wait for it — photographers.

So here is where I’ll give my armchair quarterback advice on what to do with Flickr.

Option 1 — sell it to Google. Google needs it. Google is playing catch up in a big way with Facebook in the social networking space. Google sort of has to keep Picasa as it is because it’s used by a lot of people, but Picasa in its current form will never likely become a social powerhouse. Google needs something more powerful than Picasa to funnel into Google+.

Google has the commitment to social, the money, the design and engineering talent, etc. to really do something big with it. What Instagram is to Facebook as a stand alone property, Flickr could become to Google+. Google would acquire the rich archive that Flickr represents and be able to better index this library of images for image search. They could monetize this archive better than the current Flickr/Getty deal which pays photographers out a ridiculously low rate of 20% on the sale of stock photography.

Google would get many important, visible and significant Flickr streams like the Royal Family and the President Obama that they could more deeply integrate into Google+. They’d get less famous streams but equally culturally important streams by museums and governmental archives.

Yahoo and Google have been competitors in the past. You have relationships with people at Google. If your jumping ship to Yahoo isn’t seen as an act of betrayal by your Google friends, you could definitely broker this sort of a sale.

Facebook’s a potential buyer too, but Google needs it more and the users would go with Google over Facebook I think in a migration. I might be wrong but I see Facebook post-Instagram as being more interested in growing out their photo stuff organically than in buying something like Flickr.

2. Option 2 — Seriously invest in Flickr and grow it. Flickr needs a ton of work, but could have huge potential still. Why let Getty keep the bulk of stock photography sales? Renegotiate that relationship and cut out the middle man. Acquire a stock photography agency. Open up stock sales to more users and more of their photos. Stock sales at Flickr have nothing to do with the revenue that you could generate from that business and everything to do with your ability to attract the best photographers on the web today to publish their stuff through Flickr which would be a greater benefit. The money is just an easy way to get more of these types on board.

Why am I only selling 200 of my photos as stock on Getty and getting 20% payout when I could be selling all 73,000 of my photos as stock on Flickr/Yahoo and we split it 50/50? Figure out the liability issues, these can be insured against to a large degree and use this money as a magnet to funnel the best photographers in the world into Flickr.

Your current manager for Flickr Markus Spiering is a good one but he needs a lot more resources. Flickr needs to move their new justified layout to other areas of the site. They need a basic mobile app to flip through and easily fave photos. They need a thread reader for groups on the mobile. Flickr needs circles/lists/buckets to better manage our contacts. Flickr needs more robust blocking tools — when you block someone on Flickr they should be totally invisible to you everywhere on the site.

Flickr does have what some might call an amateur porn problem or an amateur porn opportunity depending on how you look at it. What this is and how it exists at Flickr should be understood from a political/revenue standpoint and figured out — or maybe not.

Flickr needs to invest more heavily in community management. Markus has started to revitalize some of this along with Zack Sheppard, who is Flickr’s community manager, but much more work is needed here. Flickr should be courting the photography community in really robust ways and leveraging community leaders as new unofficial company evangelists (like Google Photos has done so well).

Yahoo should more broadly promote their key Flickr photographers across other Yahoo properties. Image search at Yahoo should recognize Flickr’s powerful interestingness algorithm and include far more results from Flickr in both image and web search. Yahoo should figure out how to identify key Flickr community leaders and look to promote their work across other Yahoo properties.

Option 3 — keep Flickr as it is now. This is the least attractive option in my opinion. Flickr’s value will erode over time. You’ll get less for it if you sell it later as they’ll continue to lose their lead in photo social networking in the photography space. Facebook, Instagram, Google+ are all competing heavily for this business and will only continue into the future. They are allocating millions of dollars towards their social networking efforts where photos play a big role.

Without investing in Flickr to try and reclaim the title of “king of the photo networks” and in fact leveraging this into something far beyond photos in social networking, Yahoo is much better off selling it today than waiting three years down the road.

If you ever want to talk photos at Flickr/Yahoo feel free to drop me a line. I love photography on the web and can talk about ways to make Flickr better all day long if you’re interested in it.

Oh, and sign up for a Flickr account and encourage people you know to share photos on it too. It doesn’t look like you have one yet. These things may not seem like they matter, but they do. Leading by example sends a powerful message both to the troops and to the photo community more broadly speaking. By using Flickr you also hopefully can better understand the potential of what it can become in the future.

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Photo Talk Plus Episode 30, with Special Guest Brian Matiash

Posted on July 12, 2012, 10:07 am, by Thomas Hawk, under Photo Talk Plus.

Photo Talk Plus, Episode 30!!!! Wow, we made it to 30 episodes! We had a GREAT show last night on Photo Talk Plus with the one and only Brian Matiash from onOne Software. Brian talked about his role with onOne and we had a great time going through some of his impressive photos on the show as well.

Joining Lotus Carroll and myself were panelists Keith Barrett, Google’s Events Product Manager Zach Yeskel, Karen Hutton, Kerry Murphy and Jan Kabili.

Catherine Hall made a guest appearance as well to talk about her new video show coming out Photography Unfiltered. We also had a few extras pop in including the ever present Billy Wilson and his cat Tibby as well as Brian Matiash‘s leading lady Nicole S. Young.

Brian Matiash has a wonderful processing style and I especially enjoyed going through some of his urbex photos and learning more about how and where he made them.

Last night’s stories included, the new G+ iPad app, +Catherine Hall’s new show, changes made to the “Get Started” G+ list for photographers, PHOTIGY’s HDR Processing contest, the new incredibly expensive Cintiq 24 inch HD Touch tablet, and Issue #2 of Exposed – G+ Photography Journal.

Lotus showed off her awesome new Canon 100mm f/2.8 L series lens (which I also own and LOVE too and shot like crazy shooting macros at the Denver botanical garden) and which you should totally go and buy from Adorama right now here!!!

As always, thank you to everyone who watched live and participated in the chat room as well as our amazing show sponsors who we love dearly, Adorama, Blurb Books, Drobo, and SmugMug.

Be sure to check them out at adorama.com blurb.com drobo.com and smugmug.com

Join us next week when we interview the incredible Daniel Milnor!!!

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Photo Talk Plus, Episode 29, with Special Guest Chrysta Rae

Posted on July 9, 2012, 11:30 am, by Thomas Hawk, under Photo Talk Plus.

Well we had a fantastic show last week interviewing the one and only Chrysta Rae who so many of you know and love on Google+. We talked with Chrysta about her own work as well as her work as one of the great Google+ curators with her wildly popular Scavenger Hunt.

Not only has Chrysta broken G+ is some truly epic ways, she has introduced us to so many great photographers each month with her hunt.

Joining Lotus Carroll and myself for this show were panelists Keith Barrett, Mandy Sloan, Alan Shapiro, Daniel Milnor and Lynne Goodwin.

In this episode we revisit the The Google+ One Year Anniversary Photowalk and talk about the walks that we went on, including mine in Denver, CO and Lotus’ in Austin, The July Scavenger Hunt, Trey Ratcliff’s Top 5 Tips for photographing people, Colby Brown’s Heart of a Sunflower and Ron Clifford’s post about photographing fireworks.

Thanks as always to our wonderful show sponsors SmugMug, Blurb Books, Drobo and Adorama. Be sure to check these awesome companies out at smugmug.com blurb.com drobo.com and adorama.com

Join us this Wednesday night when our special guest for Episode 30 will be Adobe’s Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty. Tom’s going to talk about what’s new in Lightroom and hopefully what may be in store for the future from the web’s most popular image processing software company.

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Depths

Posted on July 8, 2012, 8:45 am, by Thomas Hawk, under Photoblog.

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The Art of Wow

Posted on July 2, 2012, 9:29 am, by Thomas Hawk, under Uncategorized.

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I just got back from an amazing five day visit to Denver, Colorado. I came to Denver for two reasons, to participate in a conference with Janus Capital in Cherry Creek for my day job and to photograph the city as part of my project of photographing the 100 largest American cities.

I’ll have much more to say about the specifics of Denver and about the places I photographed and the wonderful people I met in other posts, but I wanted to do a quick write up on something I learned this weekend called the “Art of Wow.”

John Evans is the Executive Director of Janus Labs and gave a talk on customer service. In his talk he encouraged us to think about the business that we are in and to try and create “Wow” moments for clients. He mentioned the Ritz Carlton as being one of the premier service institutions in the world today and cited examples of them going above and beyond to create indelible important distinctive Wow moments for their guests and visitors.

In his talk, John told us about a specific visit to a Ritz Carlton Hotel after his daughter had won a recent sporting event. In the elevator up to the room they were excited about her win. The astute bellman overheard this conversation and later on that night when they came back from dinner, there was a little cake in their room with a congratulatory note for his daughter. John has told this story now thousands of times to people all over the world — and here I am now blogging it here as well. The cost of the cake for the Ritz Carlton was inconsequential — yet they have garnered an incredible and far more valuable amount of positive word of mouth PR.

On Sunday I was hanging out with my Denver friends Ryan Dearth, Jeff Wilson, Stan Sholwalter and Corbin Elliott and his wonderful family. The evening before as our One Year Anniversary Google+ Photo Walk wined down late in the night (more on that later), we made plans for breakfast the next day. I asked my friends where the absolute *best* place in Denver was for breakfast. I always like to try to find great and unique food when I visit a city. Several names were mentioned and we decided on Snooze, which Ryan especially was enthusiastic about. We agreed to meet early there because Snooze was popular and there would be a line.

We arrived at Snooze at about 8am and there was already a wait. We didn’t mind because we walked around the neighborhood shooting while we were waiting. Snooze also had free coffee and ice water for people while they wait which was great. Eventually we piled in with all our camera gear and were seated and enjoyed a wonderful breakfast. The eggs benedict were some of the best I’ve ever had.

On one visit from our waiter, I think it was Stan who inquired about if our waiter knew how we could get on a roof where there was a neon sign that I’d wanted to shoot near there. The waiter said he didn’t know but in a few minutes brought Jon Schlegel over who is the owner of Snooze. Jon didn’t know about the other building either but he did offer to get us on the roof of the building next to the one we were asking about. They were newly constructed high end condos and someone who worked at Snooze lived there and he offered to get us up. Now, Snooze was super busy. This is one of the most popular restaurants in Denver, and yet after our meal the owner *himself* walked us around the block to let us into the condo and got us to the top of the building. Wow!

See, Jon had just created a wow moment for us as customers.

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In the elevator I complimented Jon on the food and great decor of Snooze. We chatted about how he designed it based on Googie architecture and it was no surprise to me when he mentioned they would soon be opening their 7th location. The restaurant has been a huge success. Some would call Jon’s extraordinary action to a group of photographers karma, and I’m sure it is, but it was also a warm, personal, gesture from a successful businessman and restauranteur who understands the value of creating wow moments for his customers. There was even an old vintage neon sign in the condos which was a huge treat for me as well.

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A bit later on in the day we stopped by the Ritz Carlton to photograph the Dale Chihuly chandelier that they have in the lobby there. While some hotels might chase a group of pesky photographers out, we were greeted instead by Dewiet Miller, the food and beverage manager. Dewiet talked with us about our photography and then offered to take us up to the Ritz Carlton Club lounge to get some photos from up there as well. We were not even paying guests, but Dewiet extended an extraordinary amount of hospitality towards us. Interestingly enough while up in the lounge I mentioned our wonderful breakfast earlier at Snooze, and Dewiet told me that he in fact knew the owner Jon and had even given a talk to his employees on, yes, you guessed it, customer service.

After leaving the Ritz Carlton, Corbin received a phone call on his cell phone. He had traded business cards with Dewiet. Dewiet had called Corbin to let him know that I’d left a lens up in the Club lounge at the Ritz. He said he’d have it for me at the concierge’s desk.

Wow!

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Whether or not you are a professional photographer, a waiter, a doctor, a lawyer, a software engineer, or even someone who is retired, I think all of us are capable of creating wow moments for the people around us — for our customers and clients and even our family, friends and acquaintances. These meaningful authentic moments make the world a kinder and better place. They are also how businesses like

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